In an interview from prison with the Guardian, former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz has offered a robust defence of his one-time boss, the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who was executed in 2006 following his capture after the US-led invasion of 2003. Aziz insists that, despite making grave errors (such as the invasion of Kuwait in 1990), Saddam Hussein was a great patriot who made Iraq a great nation and significant regional power. Said Aziz:

"He [Saddam Hussein] is a man who history will show served his country.
"Saddam built the country and served the people. I cannot accept your [the west's] judgment that he was wrong."

The recent, conventional view of Saddam Hussein, of course, is that he was a brutal dictator who ruled his people through fear and led Iraq into a series of devastating conflicts, first with Iran and later with the west, and that, whatever the rights and wrongs of the 2003 war, his being deposed was an unqualified good. Yet an alternative case can be made – that, at the head of the Ba'athist movement, Saddam Hussein was a secular moderniser who brought economic development to Iraq, who was a bulwark against Islamic revolution (and was backed by the west against Iran in the 1980s), who cemented Iraq as unitary nation state despite the centrifugal forces of different ethnic and religious groups, and who was a novelist of some note. In this light, Saddam Hussein might be seen as belonging to a long line of nationalist leaders in the Middle East – from Kemal Ataturk, via Gamal Abdel Nasser, to Muammar Gaddafi – whose methods of internal control may have been repressive and who sometimes defied the west in grand demagogic gestures, but who have nevertheless a claim to have "served their countries", modernised them and left them greater than they found them.

Is Aziz right that history may judge Saddam Hussein somewhat differently to his latter-day detractors? What will the long view of Saddam Hussein be? And is Iraq still better-off without him than it was with him?